This Week’s Indivisible Actions: December 3-9

Angel Padilla|Indivisible|December 4, 2017

Republicans rammed the #TrumpTaxScam through Friday night in a 51-49 vote. This bill is a travesty. It gives massive tax cuts to corporations and the rich, adds $1.4 trillion to the deficit (which Republicans will use to demand cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security in 2018), will leave 13 million people without health insurance, and so much more.

Friday night’s vote was a tough loss, but the tax scam is not yet law. We have to stay mad. We have to stay focused. We have to remember that resisting the GOP’s agenda is a marathon, not a sprint.

As we get back up, dust off our shoulders, and regroup, the tax bill goes back to the House today, and the House has two options for moving forward:

Pass the Senate bill as-is despite the Senate’s bill being quite different than the House’s. This would send the bill to Trump’s desk where it would be signed into law.

Go to conference, a process where members of both chambers work out the differences between the two bills. Conference could last up to two weeks… allowing us to keep up the pressure.

Either way, Congress’ attention (and ours) shifts to the government spending bill. The government will shut down this Friday, December 8 unless a “continuing resolution” (CR) is passed. A CR allows Congress to extend the current government funding levels to keep the government open temporarily.

Democrats have real leverage in this fight. Republicans need 60 votes in the Senate and spending bills in the House have required Democratic votes to pass in recent years. We’re calling on Democrats to use their leverage to support Dreamers.

In September, Trump announced his termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era executive action allowing Dreamers to obtain work permits and live without fear of deportation after passing a background check and paying an application fee. Every day that goes by is a day in which the lives of immigrant youth are at risk. And with the clock running out on 800,00 Dreamers’ protections under DACA, a vote for the continuing resolution without protections for immigrant youth is a vote to deport Dreamers.

Senators Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) have all taken the Dreamer Pledge — a commitment to vote against the CR unless it contains protections for Dreamers. But we need more to answer our call and take the Dreamer Pledge.

Time is running out on both of these fights. Here’s what we can do this week to fight the Tax Scam and fight for Dreamers:

Today: Call 1-855-980-2350 to be connected to your Representative and tell them to vote to go to conference on the tax bill. We want to make sure that the House does not pass the Senate version as-is. If we can delay the process, we increase our chances of defeating the tax scam.

This week’s #TrumpThreatLevel

The administration continues to gut the State Department, as diplomats leave in droves. Black, Latinx, and female diplomats in particular have been forced out, which will take decades to reverse. The Pentagon has been deceiving us about troop levels in Syria. And Trump is driving away our allies, making us vulnerable to attack. Click here to see our running list of how Trump is putting us at risk.

Indivisibles Get Out the Vote in Alabama!

The Senate race between Doug Jones and Roy Moore to fill Jeff Sessions’ seat is just eight days away. Indivisible Alabama 5th District has worked hard in support of progressive champion Doug Jones by canvassing and holding phone banks to get out the vote. This week, the group spent an afternoon assisting students at Oakwood University, a Historically Black College, cast absentee ballots as their college will be closed the final few days of the election.

Best of all? They worked with the NAACP chapter on Oakwood’s campus to raise $300, which the students needed to get transportation for a bus to the registrar’s office in order to vote!

Thank you for your support

On Giving Tuesday, over 4,000 Indivisibles chipped in small amounts helping us blow through our first goal of $100,000 and our second goal of $125,000 and our third goal of $150,000, you crushed our fourth goal of $175,000! Thanks to a generous donor who matched the first $125,000 in donations, we raised $318,000 in one day. We’ll invest that in strengthening our movement and hosting THREE Indivisible Regional Institutes to train hundreds of Indivisible leaders next year.

So this week, we don’t have a fundraising ask for you. We just wanted to thank everyone for their passion and energy that inspire us every single day. For those who donated, your willingness to give and believe in our mission reminds us of our purpose every single day. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being a part of Indivisible.

Angel Padilla is the Policy Director, co-founder, and original co-author at Indivisible. As Policy Director, Angel oversees the policy team, which is tasked with demystifying Congress for the 6000+ Indivisible groups around the country. Prior to Indivisible, Angel led that National Immigration Law Center’s federal immigrant health policy agenda. He also served as an immigration policy consultant at National Council of La Raza. Before that, he was a legislative assistant for Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL), advising on issues related to health care and the Affordable Care Act, among others.

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